DNS down - set your DNS servers manually

[#1]

POTS system (end to end) has never been anywhere near five-nines.

In the last 30 years at this address I have had at least three 10 day outages - by my calculations only 99.7% reliability, somewhat less than that suggested by the complainer about Plusnet's reliability.

As for 5 hours in 50 yeas - well that is highly theoretical - such systems have not been around for 50 years, so one cannot claim that such levels of reliability have been delivered.

[#2]

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@mechanic123 wrote:

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Having a sensible message available on the phone makes more sense than a webpage - how were we supposed to acces that?

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Well if you have a mobile phone I'd use that.

Of course, I see no problem with having both a phone message and a web page.

[#3]

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@corringham wrote:

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I don't think that Plusnet have much involvement of fixing issues - and the ones they are involved in fixing (DNS?) it will be quite different people doing the fixing than those that could be doing the communicating.

Plusnet staff were involved in putting in the new DNS servers (July 2023),   there is a topic about it here

[#4]

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@Townman wrote:

POTS system (end to end) has never been anywhere near five-nines.

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Sorry, that's just wrong. How often did we fail to get dial tone when we picked up the phone. That's what we're talking about.

[#5]

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@Townman wrote:

POTS system (end to end) has never been anywhere near five-nines.

Individual lines tend not to have failover, so are liable to local issues.

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In the last 30 years at this address I have had at least three 10 day outages - by my calculations only 99.7% reliability, somewhat less than that suggested by the complainer about Plusnet's reliability.

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A day a year - which would be bad if it were an exchange issue rather than a line issue.

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As for 5 hours in 50 yeas - well that is highly theoretical - such systems have not been around for 50 years, so one cannot claim that such levels of reliability have been delivered.

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The ones I worked on a are now approaching the 50 years - which is why POTS is being retired. And I haven't access to the current figures, but the last I knew the reliability and resilience was holding up.

[#6]

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@corringham wrote:

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@mechanic123 wrote:

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Having a sensible message available on the phone makes more sense than a webpage - how were we supposed to acces that?

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Well if you have a mobile phone I'd use that.

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Tell that to my mum! Mobile phones aren't for reading web pages.

[#7]

Almost all (98%) UK adults aged 16-24 now have a smartphone (2023)

The argument that "they wouldn't be able to get the email because the Internet is down" is nonsense.

[#8]

@corringham

Absolutely the measure of “reliability” is fundamentally predicated by the scope of the “system” under consideration. End to end availability to all users at whatever percentage is quite different to availability of the core system.

You will probably know better than most around here, the exponential growth in cost to get those additional decimal points over 99% - it’s eye watering!

[#9]

Why not? If I hadn't changed during last September's DNS outage I wouldn't have had internet last night!

[#10]

@Townman, you are correct that five-nines comes at a price. However, we don't need to worry about that any more because the accountants have won, and resilience no longer matters.

It is disappointing that critical core systems such as DNS, which is designed to be inherently resilient, still fail repeatedly. That simply should not happen.

[#11]

It is disappointing that critical core systems such as DNS, which is designed to be inherently resilient, still fail repeatedly. That simply should not happen.

This is the core issue, why was it not possible to use either the Primary and Secondary DNS servers, for me I had NO issues during the outage. My Hub has been assigned 212.159.6.9 and 212.159.13.50

[#12]

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@Mav wrote:

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@willcutforth wrote:

Don't change DNS settings please.

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@willcutforth 

Not sure why you are saying that?

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I was thinking the very same thing yesterday and was kinda hoping an easy to understand explanation would have been given by now, Oh well I guess I might finally get round to installing the H2 - why offer the choice of changing DNS if you then say don't change the settings?

On another subject that's currently filling my email inbox...

PN used to have a service status page, which used to have the following URL:

http://www.plus.net/supportpages.html?a=2&%3fhelpheader=servicestatusa=2 or https://www.plus.net/supportpages.html?a=2&%3fhelpheader=servicestatusa=2 (secure)

I have no idea (nor do I really care anymore if I'm being honest) when they phased this out yet either of the above now redirect to https://www.plus.net/help/report-a-problem/

However, their service time - http://www.plus.net/supportpages.html?a=212 / https://www.plus.net/supportpages.html?a=212 now directs to their QoS page - https://www.plus.net/help/quality-of-service/ and I was genuinely surprised to see that page has not been updated since Sept' 2003. However, and it's a direct quote (I underlined what I think is important above):

Quality of service

At Plusnet we believe in being straightforward and honest. We want you to know exactly how we're performing so we can work hard to make Plusnet even better. From answering your calls to repairing your faults, here´s how we've been doing over the last few months.

And regarding that cordless thing in the corner of the room, that used to ring many times a day with overseas representatives of various UK offered products and services, when I blew the dust off it yesterday and called PN (0800 432 0200) an automated voice did notify me of an outage and promptly dropped the call. So at least I knew something was wrong by calling them. (using my mobile on their bot was another story🤔)

Surely their owner isn't making PN become more like them🙄

[#13]

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@Dan_the_Van wrote:

This is the core issue, why was it not possible to use either the Primary and Secondary DNS servers, for me I had NO issues during the outage. My Hub has been assigned 212.159.6.9 and 212.159.13.50

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Looking at this forum post,  @Dan_the_Van  your DNS assignments were the long standing DNS server addresses.

I'm wondering if those people who had DNS problems yesterday were using the new virtual IP's 212.159.13.51/52 ?

[#14]

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@Dan_the_Van wrote: snipped

My Hub has been assigned 212.159.6.9 and 212.159.13.50

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Posting for info only. Mine was:

January 2023
Primary DNS: 212.159.6.10
Secondary DNS: 212.159.6.9
Gateway: 172.16.17.41

January 2024
Primary DNS: 212.159.6.9
Secondary DNS: 212.159.13.49
Gateway: as above

And I was affected yesterday, as were several others within a 10 mile radius (though I don't know what their DNS settings were)

[#15]

@Anonymous 

Maybe i should add I have a static public IP address 80.229.243.nn ,I do recall the thread as I was a contributor.

My gateway is always 195.166.130.nnn,  current 195.166.130.250